Soon they were kissing, and then they slumped awkwardly to the bed. In a moment they were free of their Mantell clothes, shucking them in drab heaps beside the bed. Sylveste wondered if they were being observed. It seemed possible — likely even. It also seemed possible not to care. For now — for as long as this hour lasted — he and Pascale were absolutely alone; the room’s walls really infinite; the room the only open enclosure in the whole universe. It was not the first time they had made love, though the previous occasions had been rare indeed; in those few instances when the opportunity for privacy had arisen. Now — the thought almost made Sylveste laugh — they were married, and there was even less need for any subterfuge. And yet here they were again, once more snatching what intimacy they could. He felt an edge of guilt, and for a long time he wondered where it came from. Eventually, as they lay together, his head buried softly in her chest, he realised why he felt that way. Because there was so much to speak about, and instead they had squandered their time in the fevered archaeology of their bodies. But it had to be that way, Sylveste knew.
‘I wish there was longer,’ he said, when his sense of time had returned to something like normality, and he began to wonder how much of the hour remained.
‘The last time we spoke,’ Pascale said, ‘you told me something.’
‘About Carine Lefevre, yes. It was something I had to tell you, do you understand? It sounds ridiculous, but I thought I was going to die. I had to tell you; tell anyone. It was something I’d kept inside me for years.’
Pascale’s thigh was a cool pressure against his own. She drew her hand across his chest, mapping it. ‘Whatever happened out there, there’s no way I or anyone else can begin to judge you.’
‘It was cowardice.’
‘No, it wasn’t. Just instinct. You were in the most terrifying place in the universe, Dan, don’t forget that. Philip Lascaille went there without a Juggler transform — look what happened to him. That you stayed sane at all was a kind of bravery. Insanity would have been a lot easier on you.’
‘She could have lived. Hell, even leaving her to die the way I did — even that would have been acceptable if I’d had the courage to tell the truth about it afterwards. That would have been some atonement; God knows she deserved better than to be lied about, even after I’d killed her.’
‘You didn’t kill her; the Shroud did.’
‘I don’t even know that.’
‘What?’
He leant on his side, momentarily pausing to study Pascale. Before, his eyes could have frozen her image for posterity. But that feature no longer functioned.
‘What I mean is,’ Sylveste said, ‘I don’t even know she died out there — I mean, not at first. I survived, after all — and I was the one who lost the Juggler transform. Her chances would have been better, though not by much. But what if she came through it, the way I did? What if she found a way to stay alive, but just couldn’t communicate her presence to me? She might have drifted halfway to the edge of the Shroud before I came round. After I’d repaired the lighthugger, I never thought to look for her. It never crossed my mind she might still be alive.’
‘For a very good reason,’ Pascale said. ‘She wasn’t. You can question what you did now, but back then intuition told you she was dead. And if she didn’t die — she’d have found a way to get in touch with you.’
‘I don’t know that. I never can.’
‘Then stop dwelling on it. Or else you’ll never escape the past.’
‘Listen,’ he said, thinking of something else Falkender had said. ‘Do you ever speak to anyone apart from the guards? Like Sluka, or anyone like that?’
‘Sluka?’
‘The woman who’s holding us here.’ Sylveste realised with a yawning sensation that they had told her next to nothing. ‘There isn’t time for me to explain in anything but the simplest terms. The people who killed your father were True Path Inundationists, as near as I can tell, or at least one offshoot of the movement. We’re in Mantell.’
‘I knew it had to be somewhere outside Cuvier.’
‘Yes, and from what they told me Cuvier has been attacked.’ He held back from telling her the rest, which was that the city had most probably been rendered uninhabitable above ground. She did not have to know that — not just yet, when it was the only place she had ever known properly. ‘I’m not really sure who’s running it now — whether people loyal to your father, or a rival group of True Pathers. The way Sluka tells it, your father didn’t exactly welcome her with open arms once he’d gained control of Cuvier. Seems there was enough enmity there for her to arrange his assassination. ’
‘That’s a long time to hold a grudge.’
‘Which is why Sluka is possibly not the most stable person on this planet. Actually, I don’t think capturing us figured in her plans — but now she’s got us, she isn’t quite sure what to do. Clearly we’re too potentially valuable to discard… but in the meantime—’ Sylveste paused. ‘Anyway, something may be about to change. The man who fixed my eyes told me there was a rumour about visitors.’
‘Who?’
‘My question as well. But that’s as much as he said.’
‘It’s tempting to speculate, isn’t it?’
‘If anything was likely to change things on Resurgam, it would be the arrival of Ultras.’
‘It’s a bit soon for Remilliod to return.’
Sylveste nodded. ‘If there really is a ship coming in, you can bet it isn’t Remilliod. But who else would want to trade with us?’
‘Maybe trade isn’t what they’ve come for.’
Possibly it was a sign of arrogance, but Volyova was not physically capable of letting someone else do her work, no matter how absurd the alternative. She was perfectly happy — if happy was the word — to let Khouri sit in the gunnery and do her best at shooting the cache-weapon out of the sky. She was also willing to admit that using Khouri was the only sensible option available. But that did not mean that she was prepared to sit calmly by and await the outcome. Volyova knew herself too well for that. What she needed — what she craved — was some way to attack the problem from another angle.
‘Svinoi,’ she said, because, no matter how hard she tried, an answer obdurately failed to pop into her mind. Every time she thought she had hit on an approach, a way to circumvent the weapon’s progress, another part of her mind had already jumped ahead and found some impasse further down the logical chain. It was, in a way, a testament to the fluidity of her thought that she was able to critique her own solutions as soon as they came to mind; in fact, almost before she became consciously aware of them. But it also felt — maddeningly — as if she was doing her level best to sabotage her own chances of success.
And now there was this aberration to deal with.
She called it that now, because the word served to contain the mélange of incomprehension and disgust she felt whenever she forced her mind onto the topic. The topic was whatever was going on inside Khouri’s head. And, now that Khouri was immersed in the abstracted mental landscape of gunspace, the aberration necessarily included the gunnery itself, and by extension Volyova, since it was her handiwork. She was monitoring the situation closely, via neural readouts on her bracelet. There was quite a storm going on in that woman’s skull; no doubt about it. And the storm was extending troubled, flickering tendrils into gunspace.
Volyova knew that, somehow, all of this had to be related. The whole problem with the gunnery, from the beginning: Nagorny’s madness, the Sun Stealer business, and latterly the self-activation of the cache-weapon. Somehow, also, the storm in Khouri’s head — the aberration — also fitted in with things. But knowing that a solution existed, or at the very least an answer — a unifying picture which would explain everything — did not help at all.